Southern Seas (4 page)

‘My house is nice and warm. While yours … I presume you’re going to light the fire today. You’re so crazy that you only light it in summer.’

Carvalho went into the bedroom, took off his shoes and sat on the bed. His hands were clamped between his legs, and his eyes were fixed on an empty, twisted sock.

‘What’s the matter with you? Are you ill?’

Carvalho stirred himself and played for time by wandering around the bed a few times. Then he left the room, brushing past Charo, who was trying to light the fire with all the copies of
Vanguardia
she could find in the house. He went to the kitchen and took from the refrigerator one of the ten bottles of
blanc de blancs
that had been waiting for him. Maybe it’s not as good as I think, Carvalho said to himself, but one small obsession never did anybody any harm.

‘More wine? You’ll ruin your liver like that.’

Charo also drank, while Carvalho stopped his aimless meandering and lit a blazing fire with the help of one of the books from his tatty library: Forster’s
Maurice
.

‘Is it bad?’

‘It’s quite extraordinary.’

‘So why are you burning it?’

‘Because it’s garbage, like all books.’

Charo reddened slightly in the glow of the flames. She said she was going to make herself comfortable, and returned wearing the loose-fitting Chinese dress that Carvalho had brought her from Amsterdam. He remained sitting on the floor, his back
propped against the corner of the sofa and a glass of white wine in his hand.

‘When you give in, you certainly do it in style.’

Charo stroked his hair, and Carvalho took her hand, meaning to push it away. But he kept hold of it instead, and gripped it with a certain fervour.

‘What’s come over you?’

Carvalho shrugged his shoulders. Suddenly he jerked to his feet and hurried across to open the door. Bleda entered like a whirlwind.

‘Poor thing. I’d forgotten all about her.’

Charo sank resignedly into the sofa, and all but bit into her wine glass. Carvalho resumed his former position and busied himself stroking the animal’s neck and Charo’s leg.

‘You’ll have to choose. Either the dog or me.’

Charo was laughing. Carvalho hauled himself up onto the sofa, opened her Chinese dress and fondled two breasts browned by ultra-violet sunlamps and sunbathing on balconies. Charo’s hand slipped under the blue of his shirt, pinched his nipples and opened wide paths through the hair on his chest. But Carvalho stood up, poked the fire, and then turned round, as if surprised that Charo was still sitting there.

‘What are you doing there? Let’s go.’

‘Where to?’

‘Bed.’

‘I fancy doing it here.’

Charo’s hand fitted like a shell over Carvalho’s flies. As if responding to government propaganda on the need for growth, the bulge of his penis swelled to fit the mould. Carvalho stooped to pick up Bleda, took her next door and deposited her on the bed. When he returned to the fire, Charo was already naked. The half-light created by the fire outlined the features of a woman out of bloom.

He was ushered in by a secretary who had the air of an ex-convent girl about to marry her fiancé after a twelve-year courtship.

‘Señora Stuart Pedrell told me that you were coming …’

They were in the dead man’s sanctuary, the private office to which he retired for meditation—and the one he preferred above fifteen others maintained for him at his various other business addresses. The smooth Scandinavian style so fashionable in the mid-sixties was tempered by roughcast stonework set against a dark beige hessian wallcovering. Paper lampshades of vaguely oriental origins, a beige carpet, and, above the far office door, a curiously out-of-place traffic light. Its lamps extinguished, it was like a dead body, fixed to the wall like a gigantic butterfly in someone’s collection. Noticing Carvalho’s look of puzzlement, the secretary explained: ‘Señor Stuart Pedrell used it to signal whether people were or were not to be admitted to the main office—both us, and visitors.’

Carvalho moved towards the signal, half expecting it to flicker miraculously. He even stopped for a moment before pushing the sanctuary door. But man and signal looked at each other without prompting a reaction. Finally, he pushed the door and went into the main office, while the secretary opened the venetian blinds.

‘You’ll have to excuse the state of the office. It’s shut nowadays, and it gets very dusty. It’s only cleaned once a month.’

‘Were you Señor Stuart Pedrell’s secretary?’

‘Yes. At least, I was here.’

‘What did he use this office for?’

‘For listening to music. Reading. And receiving intellectual or artistic friends.’

Carvalho prepared to check through the books meticulously arranged on meticulous bookshelves, the signed paintings decorating the walls, the cocktail cabinet with its built-in refrigerator,
and the Charles Eames reclining sofa, the
nec plus ultra
of reclining sofas in contemporary patriarchal society.

‘I’d like to be left alone.’

The secretary left the room, pleased to have been ordered out so decisively. Carvalho looked through the books. Many of them were in English. American publishers. Kuhn’s
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
, Eliot’s
The Waste Land
, Melville, various German theologians, Rilke, American counter-cultural theorists, Huxley’s complete works in English, Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier, and
For Marx
. A number of yellowing news clippings were stuck to the bookcase with drawing pins. Some were reviews of new books from the
Times Literary Supplement
. Others seemed rather strange, at least for a man like Stuart Pedrell. For instance, Carrillo’s statements on the Spanish CP’s renunciation of Leninism … or an item on the Duchess of Alba’s marriage to Jesús Aguirre, editor-in-chief of
Música
.

Pinned here and there to the shelves were postcard reproductions of Gauguin paintings. On the wall, sandwiched between them, was a series of ocean maps: a huge Pacific dotted with little flag-pins marking somebody’s idea of a sea cruise. On the rosewood table, an embossed ivory vase full of pencils, ball-points and felt-tip pens. On an antique bronze desk, a jumble of schoolboy paraphernalia: erasers in various colours, pens, nibs, penholders, razor blades, blue-and-red Hispania pencils, a Faber paint-box, and even pens for italic and round-hand script, as if Stuart Pedrell had been spending his time on calligraphy and handwriting exercises.

In the drawers, there were more cuttings from articles, and a poem from a poetry magazine:
Gauguin
. In free verse, it followed Gauguin’s path from the time he gave up his bourgeois life as a bank employee until his death in the Marquesas Islands, surrounded by the world of the senses that he depicts in his paintings:

So ended the poem, by a writer unknown to Carvalho. He opened a desk diary bound in a fine leather adorned with acanthus leaves. Handwritten notes dealing with domestic economic matters. Receipts for personal effects ranging from books to shaving cream. A phrase in English caught Carvalho’s attention:

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

and underneath:

Finally:

Più nessuno mi porterà nel sud.

Carvalho made a quick mental translation:

and:

No more will anyone carry me south.

He racked his brains for a possible cabalistic meaning that might lie concealed in the three pieces of verse. He opened the cocktail cabinet and poured himself a glass of ten-year-old Fonseca port. He didn’t have bad taste, this Stuart Pedrell. Carvalho turned the lines over in his mind. Maybe they were indicative of the man’s frustrations or maybe they were the key to a project that had expired with his death. He put the paper in his pocket and searched every corner of the room, even behind the cushions of the three-piece suite. Then he turned to the wall displaying the map of the Pacific Ocean. He followed the route traced by the flags: Abu Dhabi, Ceylon, Bangkok, Sumatra, Java, Bali, the Marquesas … An imaginary voyage? A real voyage?

Next he examined the audio-visual equipment in a corner of the office and on a desk to the left of where Stuart Pedrell would have sat. Ultra-high fidelity. A compact television incorporated in an American radiocassette player. He tried all the tape recorders, in case something had been left on them. Blank. He looked over the cassettes of classical music and modern rock. Nothing you could call a clue. He called the ex-convent girl, who approached with tiny steps as if not to disturb the sanctity of the place.

‘Did Señor Stuart Pedrell book a trip in the days before he disappeared?’

‘Yes. To Tahiti.’

‘Did he book it direct?’

‘No. Through Aerojet. It’s a travel agency.’

‘Had he already paid a deposit?’

‘Yes. He also ordered a very large sum in traveller’s cheques.’

‘How much?’

‘I don’t know. But it would have been enough for a year or more abroad.’

Carvalho looked at the canvases on the wall. Thoroughly modern painters. The oldest, Tàpies, was still no more than fifty years old, and the youngest, Viladecans, was around thirty. One signature was particularly familiar to him: Artimbau. He had known him during the years of the anti-Franco struggle, before he himself had fled to the United States.

‘These painters used to come here?’

‘A lot of important people used to come.’

‘Do you know them by name?’

‘Some of them.’

‘What about this one, Artimbau?’

‘He was the nicest one. He used to come often. Señor Stuart Pedrell wanted to commission him to do a big mural on his estate at Lliteras. A huge wall was spoiling his view, and Señor Stuart Pedrell wanted Señor Artimbau to paint it for him.’

Artimbau’s studio was on Calle Baja de San Pedro. As usual, Carvalho felt a flicker of nervousness as he passed the police headquarters in Vía Layetana. He had only bad memories of the barracks-like building. However much they tried to give it a democratic
face-lift, for him it would always be a grim fortress of repression. Vía Layetana itself, though, struck him differently—a first, hesitant step towards a Barcelona Manhattan that was never going to be completed. A pre-war street with the harbour at one end and the small industry of Gracia at the other, it had been extended through Barcelona to provide the city with a commercial nerve-centre. Over time, it had come to house trade unions and employers’ organizations, as well as policemen and their victims. It also housed a large branch of the National Savings Bank. In the forefront of an expansive, sub-Gothic public park stood a monument to one of the weightier members of the Catalonian aristocracy. Carvalho walked along Calle Baja de San Pedro until he came to a large doorway giving onto a courtyard. He picked his way across the yard and began to climb a narrow, time-worn staircase that gave access to a number of rickety landings. Opening onto these were the kind of small studios favoured by architects just embarking on their careers and craftsmen on the verge of retirement. Others merely provided storage space in which leather pelts, cardboard boxes and other bits and pieces were piled high. Stopping in front of a door painted with optimistic patterns of foliage coloured in green and lilac, Carvalho rang the bell and waited for an answer. A little old man, his apron covered with marble dust, opened the door wide with slow, silent gestures and nodded for the detective to enter.